Trending Material Concerns in the Medical Device Industry

Building medical devices can be difficult when there is a shortage of materials to develop the technology.

Don Bonitati, Americas Segment Director, Trelleborg Medical Solutions, spoke to MD+DI on the MD&M Minneapolis showroom floor about some of the materials that there is a shortage of and how the company can mitigate risk for its customers.

Are there any current materials that customers are struggling to get a hold of?

Bonitati:“We’re hearing from a few customers about barium sulfate now being a supply chain constraint. This is based on there being a limited number of sources to be able to pull from to get barium sulfate. Once it was a non-issue. No one would think oh my gosh, there’s going to be an impact to barium sulfate…”

Can you talk a little bit about what barium sulfate is and how it’s used in medical devices?

Bonitati: [Barium sulfate] is a marker if you will. It’s a radiopaque material that shows up under fluoroscopy so that it could be used as a positioning guide for a physician when [he or she] is performing a vascular procedure.

Are there any other materials from a supply chain perspective that have either gone up in cost or are limited in supply?

Bonitati: "In silicon, you continue to see certain folks in the supply chain that will put that cost pressure on you.

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We get the opposite end of it from our end users, who are looking for cost benefits. Once you’re rolling into production and ramping, they want to see some benefits.

It puts us in a little bit of a difficult position because we all in the medical market have limited buying power. In other industries, we’re buying larger volumes of material. That puts us at a little bit of a disadvantage. We don’t have that same leverage point. I think our customers understand where we are at because they buy a thimble-size of material where other industries are buying a truckload. Not having that buying power really forces us to transfer that material cost onto our customers.

Now… what are we doing to mitigate that? We always offer an alternative. So, if a customer comes to us and has a special material on their product. Where they are willing to, we’re willing to offer them an alternative …"